


To The Place I Belong

by prophets



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Getting Together, Loneliness, M/M, Nebraska, Post-Canon, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:49:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29729982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prophets/pseuds/prophets
Summary: He’s driven over four thousand miles so far. He’s seen the nation’s capital and the sunbleached sands of Florida beaches. He briefly hiked the Appalachian trail, where he met a man in a lean-to who offered him a backpack full of dried crickets for protein. He paraglided in Telluride, witnessed one of Old Faithful’s regular eruptions, walked through the sandstone arches north of Moab. He’s soaked up America through its greasy spoons and fluorescent gas stations and motel showers. Adventure is caked under his fingernails.And something inside him still damnably aches.---Mike travels. He calls Ben. He drives. He calls Ben. He stares out of his van at the desert somewhere in the American Southwest, Ben in his ear, on his mind, in his heart.
Relationships: Mike Hanlon/Ben Hanscom
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	To The Place I Belong

**Author's Note:**

> I didn’t really know I had feelings about these two until I was washing my dishes and had to stop to bow my head over the sink at the image of two lonely people having a hard time adjusting to their new (old) friendship and reaching out to each other over 4G.
> 
> A mix of book/movie/whatever I want canon because I’m the kind of person who presses every button at the soda fountain of IT adaptations.
> 
> Title is predictably from John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

John Prine plays on the radio the first time Mike kisses Ben.

Ben looks startled as Mike pulls away, all of seventeen and damp-palmed with the pulsing adrenaline of his first kiss. Moving boxes litter the floor of Ben’s bedroom. There’s little more than the bed left, now.

“Why’d you do that?!” Ben asks, his wild, urgent voice hardly above a whisper.

There are many reasons Mike did it. Because he was sick of never having been kissed. Because if anyone was to have a first kiss, it should be with someone they trusted, and cared for. Because all his friends had left except for Ben, never to return and certainly never to call, and there was the silliest notion in Mike’s head that maybe this would be the thing strong enough for Ben to remember him by before he moved away, like a red string of fate Mike wove for the two of them. Stupid. It’s not like Bev ever wrote home after Ben kissed her to consciousness.

Apologies tumble from Mike’s tongue. “I didn’t mean— I’m sorry. That was dumb. I’m sorry. Please don’t look at me like that.”

Mike’s suspected for some time now that Derry is a place best left forgotten. He’s old enough to understand that aunts never visit, and friends never write, and maybe, as he fears, clowns never die. He hasn’t shared his fears with Ben. He’s been too wrapped up in the joy of riding bicycles to the Barrens, and spending the last of his quarters on Wrigley’s at the candy shop, and clinging to the final memories of his best friend, before it all goes to hell and Mike’s left alone again, just in time for his senior year. He doesn’t want to burden Ben. But he wants one day to experience the grace of forgetting for himself.

Ben’s shitty country radio switches to Waylon Jennings.

Whatever Ben sees on Mike’s face makes his school his own, replacing panic with compassion. Ben’s smart and caring like that. Yet another reason Mike kissed him. Mike’s pretty sure he wants to kiss boys now. He definitely wants to kiss Ben. He’s not sure either of these are a good thing just yet. 

“Just forget about it,” Mike begs in an egregious betrayal to every single one of his feelings. He wants Ben to remember him. He wants it more than anything.

“Okay,” Ben says. And then he moves to Texas.

\---

Twenty-four years later, Ben Hanscom hugs Mike Hanlon in a Chinese restaurant.

“Hey,” Ben greets him, arms linked firmly around Mike’s shoulders. He and Richie are close enough to Mike’s height that their hugs feel equitable—not the shoulders-and-waist hugs Mike’s acclimated to with his array of coworkers all under five foot seven. The edges of Ben’s goatee scrape against the rounded planes of Mike’s jaw.

“Hey yourself, man,” Mike replies, his breath traveling across Ben’s ear the same way Ben’s did to him. He’s so close to shuddering. “It’s good to see you.”

An understatement, to say the least.

Throughout dinner, their elbows brush, and apologies are made. Mike knows the memories are slow to return, but the question turns over in his head: Do you remember yet? Did you hate me for kissing you? Will you hate me for what I’m about to do?

Richie—a pulled-apart taffy replica of the distracting child he used to be—tugs Mike out of his thoughts by teasing Ben.

“You’re like—you’re hot,” Richie says while the whole table snorts.

“It’s true,” Eddie agrees. And, well. Isn’t that something.

Mike allows himself the indulgence of looking at Ben, committing to memory all the ways the valleys of his face and body have changed. He couldn’t grow a goatee the last time Mike saw him. Mike had been shaving for well over a year by the time Arlene readied the Hanscoms to leave, and Ben, with his five thick hairs blessing his upper lip—Mike remembers after all this time, it was five, they counted—was outrageously jealous. He always seemed to want more for his body and himself back then, frustrated at the distance between the things he wanted and the things he had.

Thirty minutes later, Bev remembers Pennywise, and there’s no room for the answers to all Mike’s unasked questions in the sewers.

\---

On a Thursday afternoon in the desert, Mike calls Ben.

It’s a thing he’s been doing a lot these past months, calling Ben. It began three weeks into his travels; after snuffing out the life of clown, Mike sold his house with the green trim and renovated a Ford Transit for life on the road, complete with a queen bed for him and an alcove for a dog bed, should he ever find a stray. Since Mr. Chips, owning a dog always felt irresponsible; to hold a life in your care in a place that tried to consume you was unsustainable. Mike didn’t know if he would live past forty. He couldn’t commit to an animal. But he could hope for space in his life for a companion, now that he had space for hope.

When Ben answers, Mike can hear his shepherd, Cash, barking in the background. “Sorry,” Ben apologizes, “I think he sees a rabbit or something.”

Mike watches a lizard scurry into the underbrush and laughs, “So do I.”

The Arizona sky blushes pink and orange as Mike and Ben catch up on their seven-way game of telephone. Mike hears Cash’s food bowl clang with filled kibble as Ben tells him Bev graduated from crashing on Kay’s couch to crashing in her bedroom. Somewhere in the arid desert, an animal yelps—caught by a coyote, maybe, as Mike asks whether Eddie has asked Ben for help with his latest post-divorce hobby, which seems to be either whittling or ham radio, depending on who and when you ask.

When they’ve exhausted the topic of their friends, all that’s left is each other. It’s something they both tend to avoid.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Ben asks. The sky has long since freckled into twilight. Mike tugs his wool blanket over his shoulders, the one with teal stripes the other librarians bought as a goodbye present. “To have these missing pieces back and to still feel…”

It’s funny how Mike knows what Ben wants to say. Most of the Losers returned to Derry paired with, and in two cases burdened by, spouses. Their lives were shared. Richie was single but treated success like an old friend, and at a certain point the pretending is enough to get one by. Mike and Ben did not have that luxury. They muscled through the workday and ate at an empty dinner table; Ben alone in his glass house, and Mike alone in his duty.

To the other Losers, their refurbished friendship was additive—something easily and eagerly slotted into the established routine of their lives, carving up the hours of their days to check in, or FaceTime, or book a weekend trip to New York or LA. The emptiness of their lives, finally filled. It’s something Ben mentioned before on one of their other evening chats, how he felt flooded with care. How he walked across his floorboards afraid he’d spill and warp the wood. He was used to loving—he loved his plants and his job and his dog, his land and his local bar and his cowboy boots. Being loved was another thing entirely. Before a fish can enter a new tank it must swim behind a plastic barrier in tepid water or risk shock. That which is not administered slowly over time will overwhelm any creature.

It’s funny how well Mike can relate. Which is to say, it’s not funny at all. The desert wind howls around him in a growing crescendo.

“I should feel whole, right? But it’s—,” Ben starts. He stops. His breath doesn’t come, but Mike knows it’s there, trapped somewhere in his wide lungs, and somewhere in the air between them, made a near and tangible thing by 4G LTE despite the one thousand three hundred miles of separation.

Mike breathes for him. “Yeah,” he says. “It doesn’t feel too different.”

“I thought it would,” Ben confesses, voice like hushed morning grass, thick and wet with dew. There’s a sob hiding behind his sentences that Mike wants to dam up before it breaks.

“Me, too,” Mike confesses right back. His view is of a small spotted bird perched upon the spiked arm of a saguaro, barely visible in the dusk. He’s not sure what kind of bird—a wren, maybe. He should take a picture for Stan. Better yet, he should call.

He’s driven over four thousand miles so far. He’s seen the nation’s capital and the sunbleached sands of Florida beaches. He briefly hiked the Appalachian trail, where he met a man in a lean-to who offered him a backpack full of dried crickets for protein. He paraglided in Telluride, witnessed one of Old Faithful’s regular eruptions, walked through the sandstone arches north of Moab. He’s soaked up America through its greasy spoons and fluorescent gas stations and motel showers. Adventure is caked under his fingernails.

And something inside him still damnably aches.

“It’s like,” Mike continues, “I thought there was this whole world out there for me, y’know? I had to stay behind— no, don’t say it, I don’t want to hear any more about y’all’s guilt. It had to be done. I’m not sorry about staying. But I thought I was trapped by that town. I thought the opposite of Derry was anywhere but Derry. But I just took the cage with me.”

What he doesn’t say is: for most of his life he was the solitary guard in a panopticon keeping Derry under his watchful eye, and fulfilling his life’s purpose didn’t bring him the relief or freedom he craved. He drove, and kept driving, and drove some more, his past stretching only so far as his rearview mirror allowed. He abandoned his history. He no longer carried with him the Black Spot; the weight of his life and the weight of Derry couldn’t fit in the Transit. He traveled with a blank slate, mind now freed from the knowledge of all there was to know about a wretched little town where evil had to be dug up by the roots.

What is it like to have a friend? What is it like to be one? Those are the things Mike is still learning. And in learning he has yet to understand how to release the iron band around his heart, the one that kept his memories of the only friends he ever loved safe, still and untouched as his body stretched, shifted, and settled around them—and the very same iron bands that barred any attachment to a life outside the library. He stood vigil because someone had to, and it was the right thing to do in a town so otherwise paralyzed by fear or insidious compliance—but no small part of him stayed because he knew there was a future in which the Losers could be together again, if only one was sacrificed. He just hadn’t realized everyone else would suffer, too, in their own way.

Mike knows Ben’s lonely despite their new lives because Ben doesn’t know any other way to be. What he doesn’t know is how to reach his hand across a phone call and say _me too_ without having to utter the words.

“I want things to be different,” Ben says at last, his voice creaking like a ship at sea. “For you and for me.”

“Losers stick together,” Mike replies.

“Do you—do you remember when you kissed me? Before I left for Texas?” Ben asks.

Mike’s glad he’s sitting down. He shuts the back doors of his van against the cold and lays across his lofted bed in the perfect imitation of a teenager talking to his crush. All that’s missing is the spiral cord coiled around his finger, cutting off circulation at the distal phalanx. He says, “How could I forget?”

“I think I reacted badly back then,” Ben says. Mike tries not to think about Ben mirroring his position in his own bedroom in Nebraska. Mike often tries not to think about Ben’s empty house and all the spaces he could fill amongst all the plants and modern austerity, though Mike rarely succeeds.

“How do you mean?” Mike asks.

“I think I made it sound like I didn’t want you to kiss me.” Mike puts Ben on speaker and mutes himself, dropping the phone somewhere in the folds of the bed as he covers his face with his hands.

“I was surprised,” Ben continues, “because I didn’t think anyone wanted to kiss me. Did I ask you why? That was stupid. I guess I just thought it was a joke, like you were pranking me or something. I thought you didn’t mean it.”

Mike scrambles to pick his phone up and unmute himself. “It wasn’t. I wouldn’t.”

“I can see that now, but, you gotta admit, the timing wasn’t great on that one. I mean, the day before I moved, Mike?”

“Hey, fuck you, haven’t you ever heard of a Hail Mary pass?” Mike asks with a laugh. 

Ben’s quiet for a moment before he says, “Listen, I just think—it would be different. If you tried again.”

Mike’s heart sprouts wings and flails against the walls of his chest cavity. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Won’t know if you don’t try, though.”

“Well, you know,” Mike says. “I’ve been meaning to visit Kansas City again. I guess I could always make a detour north to Nebraska. If you’d like that.”

“I’d like that.” Mike hears the smile in Ben’s voice. “I’d like that a lot.”

\---

A home, by definition, is a place where one lives. Mike lived in Derry, but Derry is not Mike’s home. Neither is the van, really. They are places where existence happens; they are places to be left.

A home, in the romantic sense, is a person. But that can’t be right, either. That would mean Mike has six homes. He really only needs the one.

A home, by Mike’s estimate, is a noun that’s nearly a verb. It is a state of belonging. It is a thing one curates, like a thoughtful magpie arranging a nest; it is a thing one makes with one’s hands, molding a shape of oneself into the clay of the earth. It can be a place, or a person, or both. The only qualification is that it must make you feel whole, or something like it.

In all these months and all these miles, Mike hasn’t been looking to put his past behind him, nor has he sought the thrill of an unfettered future.

Mike has been looking for a road home. He drives to Nebraska.

Ben is on his front porch as Mike travels up the gravel road, van singing as stones plink against its underbelly. Standing there, hands on his hips, plaid shirt only half-buttoned, mouth creased into a smile—Ben makes for one handsome devil.

Mike grins.

He hops out of the van, two fingers looped into the cardboard handle of a six pack. As he slams the driver’s side door behind him, they regard each other with matching sets of pearly whites.

“Storm’s coming,” Ben says in lieu of a hello, head tipping to the bruising navy sky that’s been following Mike for some twenty odd miles.

“Yeah,” Mike says, cheeks damn near aching.

“Wanna watch?” Ben asks, already folding himself into a deck chair.

“Yeah,” Mike echoes. The steps toward Ben thump under his feet—Mike knows from the sound that they’re made of wood, but they feel light beneath his soles, lighter than air.

The second time Mike kisses Ben, it rains, and under the hefty cling of wet clothes, Mike warms his hands around the hearth of Ben’s heart.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m on twitter @smallfrysteel!


End file.
